


Leave Me at the Altar

by BeesKnees



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 12:37:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4522251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeesKnees/pseuds/BeesKnees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katniss' guilt distills itself in the ghostly form of Finnick Odair. </p>
<p>"You're not real," she tells him. </p>
<p>"Why does that matter?" he answers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave Me at the Altar

The phone rings as the sun is setting. Peeta is the one who answers, listening more than anything else. He gives the occasional affirmative answer and then, “Oh, that's good.” By the lack of alarm in his voice and the easy set to his shoulders, Katniss figures it isn't bad news. 

She opts to stay tucked into the couch, watching Peeta instead. He is silhouetted by the fading light. In this moment, in this light, he could be just Peeta, the one who didn't go into the games and the one who wasn't scarred by the war. He could have been a Peeta who just stayed here, carried on in the bakery. 

Of course, Katniss doesn't have the luxury of pretending such things. Neither of them do, and neither do they really try. Ignoring the scars discredits them: They are maimed inside and out, lost more than they thought they could be.

So, no, he's not the Peeta who didn't go into the games, because he never can be that Peeta. (Does he blame he for that, she wonders? They talk carefully, still needing to skirt around the war for the most part. They talk about the weather and their garden and going to the market and to see Haymitch. They do not talk about when one of them wakes up screaming. They do not talk about the slow way they touch, as if everything is new, how some days, they can barely do more than hold hands, clinging to each other like lifelines. They talk about Johanna and Annie, but they do not talk about Gale or Katniss' mother.

They don't talk about what he might have been if she hadn't volunteered to be in the games. How he could be enjoying the quiet simplicity of death, of being no more than a pile of dirt and a sprig of flowers and a cold, hard stone. They don't talk about how even if he was a victor, and had endured the worst of what victors had endured, it would still be less than what she had heaped upon their heads.

She wonders. Where do they place the blame with her?)

“Annie had the baby,” Peeta announces, turning to face her again.

“That's good,” Katniss answers.

They don't talk about Finnick.

... 

They sleep with a light on in the hallway usually, because neither of them can bear the complete darkness. (Where has this fear come from? What moment did the scales tip out of favor and every shadow became a demon?) They sleep in the same bed, as they did on their Victory Tour, touches warm and platonic, an offering to the shrine of their subconscious.

When Katniss wakes up tonight, short of breath, shuddering and drenched in sweat, it is dark. All she can hear at first is her own breathing, quick and shallow. And then she hears something in the hallway: footsteps followed by a clank of metal. She grabs Peeta. He huffs, startled, and shoots up in bed. He tries to ask her what's wrong, but he can't form the words. She can't answer. The footsteps sound closer to their bedroom. (She wishes for the reassurance of a bow in her hand, but they've both agreed they can't be trusted with weapons, not in their home. Maybe never again.)

She scrambles toward the edge of the bed, lunges forward – “ _Katniss_ ,” Peeta says – and flips the light on. She throws the door open. The hallway is empty.

“I heard someone,” she says pointedly. Peeta is behind her now. His hand hovers, but doesn't land on her. They edge forward into the hallway and Peeta begins to open doors. Each room is empty. They repeat this, over and over, for an hour. No one is in the house, but still, Katniss feels uneasy. (Did she dream up the noise?)

“We can stay up,” Peeta offers. (It wouldn't be the first time, after all.)

“No,” Katniss answers, shakes her head. They go back to bed, making sure their light is on. Peeta falls back asleep quickly, but Katniss stays up for the rest of the night, pressed against the wall, listening to the sound of nothing.

They spend the next day at Haymitch's and getting ready to go into Four. When it grows dark again that evening, she can't help but check around the house once again. She tries to not make it obvious what she's doing, but she feels Peeta's gaze on her all the same. 

Despite her concerns, she does fall off to sleep tonight. She wakes, in the middle of the night, to the sound of metal clinking against something – much closer this time. She shoots up. 

Someone's seated on the edge of their bed. 

Katniss' hand lurches for Peeta, but doesn't quite make it to his shoulder. She doesn't know what it is that strikes her first: the trident across his lap, the bulky soldier's uniform she is too familiar with, or the golden glint of his hair. _Finnick_. Her heart lurches messily into her throat, and she can't breathe. He turns to look back at her, and there's just enough light that she can make out the gashes on the side of his face – the deep clawmarks that slice down from his cheekbone and merge into the bite on his throat. It's raw, bloody, strings of muscle visible, and Katniss can't look away. 

(He's not real, some part of her brain pleads. He's not real. Finnick is dead, and they couldn't even find his body because of the flames –)

But he just sits there, dripping blood onto the carpet, staring at her. His fingers drum idly over the shaft of the trident.

“Why are you here?” That's her voice, wrenched from her throat, small and painful. And it's a mistake to speak those words because they seem to solidify him. 

“Where else would I be?” he asks. He moves to smile in that lazy, self-assured way of his, but the corner of his lip is torn. Katniss closes her eyes and presses her hands over her ears. When she looks again, he has dissolved into the morning light. She fumbles out of bed before Peeta can wake up. She grabs towels from the bathroom and blots up the blood on their floor, her hands shaking. 

She stares at the towels with a sense of panic when she is done. What does she do with them now? Her mind stalls out and the only thing she can think of is to burn them. She gathers them and heads outside, grabbing firewood as she goes. Some part of her is numbly processing all of this: Finnick is dead, but if his blood is real, what does that mean? 

She gets the fire started and stands back, watching the towels go up in smoke. Peeta finds her standing out there. He looks sleepy and mussed, but his concern is obvious.

“Katniss,” he says gently. 

She doesn't answer him.

“What is it?” he asks. His fingers ghost over her shoulder. She doesn't know if anybody would say they're well. But with each day between them and the war, they edge closer to better. Or, at least, they know how to cope with their demons. But this is a fresh one, and she doesn't know how to give voice to it. 

Peeta doesn't press her. 

Katniss continues to stare at the fire. Her eyes turn gritty with smoke and lack of sleep. 

“We don't have to go to Four,” Peeta says finally, quietly. His hand finally steadies against her arm.

“We should,” Katniss answers. She doesn't know if it would help or hurt or destroy. She merely knows that Annie and Johanna are their family these days. 

…

Haymitch appears to be sober when they arrive at the train station, which is either a testament to how important he finds this trip or to how good he has gotten at hiding his inebriation. This is the first time any of them have been on the train since they were shipped back out to Twelve. It is a silly fear, but she can't help but feel a thump of trepidation when they step foot inside. It looks different, of course. The trains, once outfitted for the pleasure of a few, have been reformatted. They're mostly seats now to help facilitate free travel between the districts.

Only a few passengers are on, but they all stare at the three of them. They don't go out in public much, segregating themselves to each other and occasional trips to the market. Everyone wonders just how much the war has broken the Girl on Fire and the Baker's Boy, and the conclusion, Katniss is certain everyone draws, is that it would have been kinder for the two of them to die. Instead, they try to fit themselves back into normal lives, to run through motions, but without so many of the things that they fought the war for. 

Usually, she can ignore this. She doesn't _care_ what other people think about her. But today, their eyes grind into her back, as if they see through all the vulnerable bits of her. (As if they see her burning bloody towels in her yard, conjuring demons out of dissipated ghosts.) 

Peeta reaches for her hand with a measured slowness. She lets him take it even though she doesn't expect it to help. 

It must, because she wakes up and they're getting off the train in Four.

She stares at the window for a moment, at the swath of ocean in front of them. The air tastes different here. How strange is it that she has been here before? She and Peeta had stood here during their Victory Tour, and Annie and Finnick and Mags had probably all been somewhere nearby. She'd had no idea how their lives were all about to collide. Really, her memories of this district aren't even distinct compared to the others, all a hazy blur of lies, trepidation, and fear.

Peeta doesn't let go of her hand as they disembark. He's caught up in looking around, his eyes roaming from the line of the water to the sky above it; she catches this glimpse of him, the boy on this train who had told her that he loved the colors of a sunset. Does he still have that impulse to paint, she wonders? Is that still there, hidden inside of him? Or is a tug that turns painful, something else sullied?

She doesn't ask him because she doesn't know how.

To her surprise, Haymitch is the one who leads the group, who apparently knows where Johanna and Annie's little house is. It's not far from the water, the yard heaped full of sand and tall grass. It's painted a warm, sunshine yellow, and is worn in some places from the weather. 

Johanna appears in the doorway as they head up the walk. She's tan and lean. Her hair is still short, but grown in enough that one would never know what happened so recently. She even has some scattered red dyed back into it. 

She waves them up the stairs but presses a finger to her mouth, indicating they should be quiet. 

The house creaks underneath them when they walk inside. The kitchen sink has a few dishes in it, and there's a laundry basket on top of the kitchen table. A half folded stack of laundry sits behind it. Strangely, it hits Katniss, that this is a _home_. What she and Peeta have been living in all these weeks is just a house, some place where they exist but don't really inhabit. 

Johanna slouches in front of them into the living room. A few fans oscillate on the ground, whirring back and forth, back and forth. Annie is asleep on the couch, her head tilted against the arm, hair tied up out of her face. There's a crib in the middle of the room, which is where they all gather around. 

Tristan Odair, days old, is napping inside it. 

Annie stirs, languidly on the couch. She blinks sleepily up at them.

“Jo,” she starts to say. “You should have told me--” 

“I've got him,” Johanna reassures her. “You can go back to sleep.” Annie smiles warmly at them, but then unfurls from the couch, stretching slowly. She pads over to the crib and then gathers Tristan up. Her hands, for the first time since Katniss has known her, aren't shaking. (This is a work in progress, not a destination. Katniss knows, because Johanna had rallied, been the one ready to fight in Annie's defense for if they came to take the baby from her. But Annie has fought for herself, and for her son, in this quiet and neat way. Everyone in this room knows that love is not enough to heal their wounds, but Annie has been swallowed by the hurricane, endured the worst that life can throw at her, and has found herself still standing on the other side.)

Annie steps up next to Peeta and slides the baby into his arms. Tristan lets out a sleepy sounding mewl and opens his eyes for a moment. 

Katniss is struck by the image of Peeta looking down at the baby. (He, too, forgets that he's supposed to be afraid of himself when it comes to fragile things. Instead, he's smiling – really smiling, the one that Katniss misses so much that she can't stand to look at him some days.) Annie and Peeta talk quietly over Tristan's head, trading small talk back and forth that might as well be a different language to Katniss. 

“Do you want to hold him?”

She doesn't know who asked the question, but Johanna and Annie and Peeta are all suddenly looking at her. (Haymitch has slumped down into an armchair.) Katniss' gaze drops down to the baby, but all she can remember is all the things she has broken in her lifetime and just how vulnerable a baby is. 

She shakes her head, actually takes half a step back.

“You're not going to hold my son?”

Katniss' heart stops at the sound of that voice. Finnick steps into her line of view. His trident is strapped to his back, but he is still in battle gear, half of his face torn to shreds. The image is even more horrifying in the full light of day. 

“I'm not ever going to be able to hold him, and you're going to refuse the chance?” Finnick presses her. He leans almost lazily into Peeta and ghosts one hand over Tristan's head. But none of the others are even looking at him. So, he can't be real. He's not real. He's in her head. She wants to argue with him, to tell him he's not real. But she can't do anything, not without revealing that she's dreamt up Finnick's ghost.

“What does matter if I'm only in your head?” Finnick lilts. (Everything he says has the lazy drawl of the voice he used in the Capitol. It rings of cruelty.)

“Katniss?” Peeta prods. 

Katniss shakes her head, a frenetic motion. 

“You just watched,” Finnick continues softly, still stroking the top of Tristan's head. “You didn't even try to shoot an arrow. You didn't try to move. You didn't even check to make sure I was dead when you dropped the Holo.” 

Tristan is awake, one sleepy hand wrapped around Peeta's finger. Annie coos warmly down at her son. Even Peeta is smiling. But Katniss can only stare at where Finnick is. His gaze holds her in place, pins her down, asks her how she has any right to be standing in this room when they never even found Finnick's body to give him a decent burial. 

Johanna and Peeta keep chancing glances at her, as if trying to unwind what is wrong. But she remains frozen anyway, unable to move for fear she will reveal just how _much_ is wrong. She tries to find the seams of where reality ends, looks for the differences between Peeta and Finnick. But she can't find them. Instead, the harder she looks, the more real Finnick seems to be. She can smell the stench of the sewers again, dreams up the raw smell of Finnick's wounds. She remembers the blast that came up the sewer after her: burning meat. 

“I,” Katniss tries to say, but her words are locked inside of her. She turns and blindly flings herself back out of the house. She stumbles across the sand as she takes in heaving breaths, tucks her hands against her ribs. 

“I _followed_ you,” Finnick hisses behind her. “I saved you, and Peeta, in the Quarter Quell. I believed in you, Katniss.” 

“No,” Katniss begs. (Again, she knows she shouldn't. But her mind rings with the fights through the Capitol, the traps and the constant stream of death. Boggs and Castor and Messalla – but even further back than that, isn't it? Mags and Wiress, and _Rue_.) Everyone who had allied with her had been destroyed. All she had wanted to do was save Prim. She hadn't even managed that. 

“It's your fault,” Finnick says, and he's in front of her, trident planted in the sand. 

Katniss shakes her head again, drops to her knees, and presses her hands over her ears. She tries to blot out his words. They don't lose their acid any. She cries, silently, tears streaking down her cheeks. 

“Shh, shh,” someone says gently, coming up behind her and wrapping their arms around her. Katniss is surprised by the touch. She goes ramrod straight, but doesn't break free from the hold. She's even more surprised when she realizes it's Annie. Annie keeps making gentle shushing noises, stroking a hand through her hair. 

“I killed him,” Katniss chokes out.

“No,”Annie says. Her voice is quiet but also firm. “No, Katniss, no, you didn't.” 

“I should have …” Katniss tries. _She should have done more. She should have saved him._

“You did everything you could,” Annie says gently. She sits back on the sand, bringing Katniss with her and brushes hair out of her face. “Finnick knew what he was doing. He knew the dangers.” 

“I keep seeing him,” Katniss whispers, her secret delivered. She _is_ crazy; the war has broken her. That is what everyone says now, isn't it? The Girl on Fire has burned out. She is smoke and ash now, destroyed and insubstantial. 

But Annie just says, “Oh,” as if it makes sense. 

“I kept seeing him in the Capitol after,” Annie says quietly. “Everywhere. Wondering why I hadn't tried harder to make him stay. He would have. If I had asked. And then I found out I was having Tristan.” She laughs in a soft way, an indecipherable sound. “I remembered that Finnick loved me. He wouldn't have hurt me like that. And he wouldn't hurt you like this either.” She reaches tentatively for Katniss' hand. “Finnick loved you, too, Katniss, and it's not fair to him that we use him for our guilt.”

Katniss chances a glance upward, but it's just her and Annie sitting on the beach. Katniss lets out a hiccuping noise and can't quell her tears. She continues to cry, but Annie wraps an arm around her and Katniss lets her head rest against Annie's shoulder.

“It wasn't your fault,” Annie says again, the words nearly whispered. (Has anyone else said this to her? She doesn't know. She wants to believe it, but she's not sure she can any longer. The path through the Hunger Games and the war feels so disastrous. She doesn't know when she should have made different calls. She was trying to protect the people she loved.)

“It wasn't your fault,” Annie says again. “And you're not alone. We're all here.”

…

She helps out around the house. The pace a newborn baby sets help all of them. None of them have time for guilt or sorrow or wondering over whether they should be here at all. (But, together, neither does Tristan overwhelm them.) Katniss takes charge of keeping the house in order, cleaning out the rooms in turn, doing loads of laundry, making up meals, and heading to market. She and Johanna take turns with these things while Peeta helps Annie with Tristan. He gives baths, let Tristan suck on his fingers and fall asleep on his chest. 

Tristan is, Katniss thinks, a happy baby. He gives sleepy smiles all the time and already Johanna playfully chastises him for being a little heartbreaker. 

Katniss still shies away from holding him. There's a simplicity that comes from watching him that brings her a near sense of contentment. She doesn't know how to put this into words. It's enough for her, somehow, to be in the living room while Annie sways back and forth, singing to Tristan in her arms. It's enough to hear his laughter. 

She misses Finnick in an honest sort of way, because she knows he would have loved his son. Sometimes, she catches this expression on Annie's face, where she'll turn around, look as if she's about to say something and then stop. She's remembering the loss of Finnick, that he's not here to share in what she's feeling. 

But in those same breaths, they work on loving Tristan, each in their own way. 

Katniss didn't manage to save Finnick or her sister. She knows those scars will never disappear fully. They will linger, lashed over her heart. 

But for the first time since she lost so much of herself, she wonders who she might have succeeded in saving the world for.


End file.
